Regina Spektor's Live in London Album Was An Accident

About a month before Regina Spektor took the stage at the Hammerstein Ballroom in London, her friends said, "Hey! Let's make a concert film! Where are you off to next?"

Most Popular

The answer was London, and the next answer was, "OK!"

"I bet organized people would figure it out in advance. I'm such a half-hazard person and things come very last minute," she explained when asked how she picked London for the live album. "In hindsight it worked out better than we thought; it's an incredible venue, and London's really the only other city where I began playing like I did in New york."

As for the album, she calls it an afterthought: "The concert was really long, but the film was cut down to just 64 minutes — it had to be entertaining! So there's all this bonus material on the DVD, but when we decided to make an album, too I thought we should put as many songs as possible on it because I figured if someone is getting a live record, they want it all! So it has 22 songs."

We've always wondered if it's possible for a performer to be normal at a concert if he or she knows it's being filmed, and that it'll stand for years as the only visual representation of their live performances. Spektor says, "I was sort of conscious unfortunately, but I wish that I could
really really not think about it. It's hard when you play so many shows and they're all different and there are little moments in each show where somethings are like, "Wow, I've never done that before," or "That song was really good!" and then the next day it's the opposite. You have to commit to one version of something and you're like "Shit! That's not the best version! The best version was three months ago in a basement and no one was there to hear it!"

Maybe so, but the album, which comes out next Monday, November 22nd sounds pretty perfect — even without basement acoustics.